Training healthcare assistants working in adult acute inpatient wards in Psychological First Aid: An implementation and evaluation study.

WHAT IS KNOWN ON THE SUBJECT: Healthcare assistants are untrained and unregistered frontline staff but are expected to be proactive in preventing and responding to 'untoward' incidents quickly and efficiently when working within adult acute inpatient psychiatric settings. Healthcare assistants should be trained to provide enhanced care to service users residing in acute psychiatric settings. To date, a training programme in Psychological First Aid has not been expended in such a setting with nonregistered staff. WHAT THE PAPER ADDS TO EXISTING KNOWLEDGE: The study demonstrates that training healthcare assistants in Psychological First Aid is useful in improving their confidence in caring for service users, therapeutic engagement with service users and ward culture in general. WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: A training programme in Psychological First Aid for healthcare assistants to enhance ward culture can be implemented in different practice environments. Psychological First Aid is harmonious with nursing values and provides healthcare assistants with a relevant, useful and easily understood toolkit to apply in acute psychiatric settings. ABSTRACT: Introduction Healthcare assistants working within adult acute inpatient psychiatric settings are untrained and unregistered, however, they can contribute to quality service if they receive some training. Psychological First Aid training has never been expended in these settings, so this study intends to fill this gap in the existing evidence with this category of healthcare personnel. Aim The aim of this study was to introduce and evaluate first aid training for healthcare assistants. Method A pre/post design was adopted to gather data using questionnaires and interviews. The groups of participants included 16 healthcare assistants trained in Psychological First Aid, a sample of service users and four ward managers. Results Post-training, (a) healthcare assistants and service users ranked the therapeutic milieu of the ward more favourably, (b) the self-efficacy of the healthcare assistants increased, and the number of 'untoward' incidents decreased, and (c) health care assistants' confidence in their skills was high. The ward manager interviews post-training revealed four themes: (a) staff utilization of new skills and renewed enthusiasm, (b) calmer atmosphere on the ward and staff togetherness, (c) confidence and reflection on practice and (d) therapeutic engagement. Discussion Training healthcare assistants is useful in improving staff confidence, therapeutic engagement with service users and ward culture in general. Implications for practice Techniques and skills learnt are relevant and useful to healthcare assistants and provide an easily understood toolkit that is harmonious with nursing values. If executed correctly, the training can enhance practice and care outcomes and the overall service user experience

Does Emotional Disclosure About Stress Improve Health in Rheumatoid Arthritis? Randomized, Controlled Trials of Written and Spoken Disclosure

Studies of the effects of disclosing stressful experiences among patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have yielded inconsistent findings, perhaps due to different disclosure methods—writing or speaking—and various methodological limitations. We randomized adults with RA to a writing (n = 88) or speaking (to a recorder) sample (n = 93), and within each sample, to either disclosure or one of two control groups (positive or neutral events), which conducted 4, 20-minute, at-home sessions. Follow-up evaluations at 1, 3, and 6 months included self-reported, behavioral, physiological, and blinded physician-assessed outcomes. In both writing and speaking samples, the disclosure and control groups were comparably credible, and the linguistic content differed as expected. Covariance analyses at each follow-up point indicated that written disclosure had minimal effects compared to combined controls—only pain was reduced at 1 and 6 months, but no other outcomes improved. Spoken disclosure led to faster walking speed at 3 months, and reduced pain, swollen joints, and physician-rated disease activity at 6 months, but there were no effects on other outcomes. Latent growth curve modeling examined differences in the trajectory of change over follow-ups. Written disclosure improved affective pain and walking speed; spoken disclosure showed only a marginal benefit on sensory pain. In both analyses, disclosure’s few benefits occurred relative to both positive and neutral control groups. We conclude that both written and spoken disclosure have modest benefits for patients with RA, particularly at 6 months, but these effects are limited in scope and consistency

Uniqueness of Normal Forms is Decidable for Shallow Term Rewrite Systems

Uniqueness of normal forms (UN=) is an important property of term rewrite systems. UN= is decidable for ground (i.e., variable-free) systems and undecidable in general. Recently it was shown to be decidable for linear, shallow systems. We generalize this previous result and show that this property is decidable for shallow rewrite systems, in contrast to confluence, reachability and other properties, which are all undecidable for flat systems. Our result is also optimal in some sense, since we prove that the UN= property is undecidable for two superclasses of flat systems: left-flat, left-linear systems in which right-hand sides are of depth at most two and right-flat, right-linear systems in which left-hand sides are of depth at most two

Spin squeezing in nonlinear spin coherent states

We introduce the nonlinear spin coherent state via its ladder operator formalism and propose a type of nonlinear spin coherent state by the nonlinear time evolution of spin coherent states. By a new version of spectroscopic squeezing criteria we study the spin squeezing in both the spin coherent state and nonlinear spin coherent state. The results show that the spin coherent state is not squeezed in the x, y, and z directions, and the nonlinear spin coherent state may be squeezed in the x and y directions.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figs, revised version submitted to J. Opt.

Extended coherent states and modified perturbation theory

An extended coherent state for describing a system of two interacting quanum objects is considered. A modified perturbation theory based on using the extended coherent states is formulated.Comment: LaTex, 7 pages, no figures, minor correction

Nowhere to Hide: Radio-faint AGN in the GOODS-N field. I. Initial catalogue and radio properties

(Abridged) Conventional radio surveys of deep fields ordinarily have arc-second scale resolutions often insufficient to reliably separate radio emission in distant galaxies originating from star-formation and AGN-related activity. Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) can offer a solution by identifying only the most compact radio emitting regions in galaxies at cosmological distances where the high brightness temperatures (in excess of $10^5$ K) can only be reliably attributed to AGN activity. We present the first in a series of papers exploring the faint compact radio population using a new wide-field VLBI survey of the GOODS-N field. The unparalleled sensitivity of the European VLBI Network (EVN) will probe a luminosity range rarely seen in deep wide-field VLBI observations, thus providing insights into the role of AGN to radio luminosities of the order $10^{22}~\mathrm{W\,Hz^{-1}}$ across cosmic time. The newest VLBI techniques are used to completely cover an entire 7'.5 radius area to milliarcsecond resolutions, while bright radio sources ($S > 0.1$ mJy) are targeted up to 25 arcmin from the pointing centre. Multi-source self-calibration, and a primary beam model for the EVN array are used to correct for residual phase errors and primary beam attenuation respectively. This paper presents the largest catalogue of VLBI detected sources in GOODS-N comprising of 31 compact radio sources across a redshift range of 0.11-3.44, almost three times more than previous VLBI surveys in this field. We provide a machine-readable catalogue and introduce the radio properties of the detected sources using complementary data from the e-MERLIN Galaxy Evolution survey (eMERGE).Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, accepted in A&A. Machine-readable table available upon reques

Simulation of fluid flows during growth of organic crystals in microgravity

Several counter diffusion type crystal growth experiments were conducted in space. Improvements in crystal size and quality are attributed to reduced natural convection in the microgravity environment. One series of experiments called DMOS (Diffusive Mixing of Organic Solutions) was designed and conducted by researchers at the 3M Corporation and flown by NASA on the space shuttle. Since only limited information about the mixing process is available from the space experiments, a series of ground based experiments was conducted to further investigate the fluid dynamics within the DMOS crystal growth cell. Solutions with density differences in the range of 10 to the -7 to 10 to the -4 power g/cc were used to simulate microgravity conditions. The small density differences were obtained by mixing D2O and H2O. Methylene blue dye was used to enhance flow visualization. The extent of mixing was measured photometrically using the 662 nm absorbance peak of the dye. Results indicate that extensive mixing by natural convection can occur even under microgravity conditions. This is qualitatively consistent with results of a simple scaling analysis. Quantitave results are in close agreement with ongoing computational modeling analysis

Coherent states for a particle on a sphere

The coherent states for a particle on a sphere are introduced. These states are labelled by points of the classical phase space, that is the position on the sphere and the angular momentum of a particle. As with the coherent states for a particle on a circle discussed in Kowalski K {\em et al} 1996 {\em J. Phys. A} {\bf 29} 4149, we deal with a deformation of the classical phase space related with quantum fluctuations. The expectation values of the position and the angular momentum in the coherent states are regarded as the best possible approximation of the classical phase space. The correctness of the introduced coherent states is illustrated by an example of the rotator.Comment: LaTeX, 16 pages, 2 figure

Spin squeezing, entanglement and quantum metrology with Bose-Einstein condensates

Squeezed states, a special kind of entangled states, are known as a useful resource for quantum metrology. In interferometric sensors they allow to overcome the "classical" projection noise limit stemming from the independent nature of the individual photons or atoms within the interferometer. Motivated by the potential impact on metrology as wells as by fundamental questions in the context of entanglement, a lot of theoretical and experimental effort has been made to study squeezed states. The first squeezed states useful for quantum enhanced metrology have been proposed and generated in quantum optics, where the squeezed variables are the coherences of the light field. In this tutorial we focus on spin squeezing in atomic systems. We give an introduction to its concepts and discuss its generation in Bose-Einstein condensates. We discuss in detail the experimental requirements necessary for the generation and direct detection of coherent spin squeezing. Two exemplary experiments demonstrating adiabatically prepared spin squeezing based on motional degrees of freedom and diabatically realized spin squeezing based on internal hyperfine degrees of freedom are discussed.Comment: Phd tutorial, 23 pages, 17 figure